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kowtow

The media bury the report that the SIS conducted a warrantless search last year way down in a bulletin and spend about 15 seconds on it , there was the abuse of the Alan Kurdi photo to force the illegal immigration issue .They proclaim loudly they are ‘Charlie” but won’t publish a cartoon.

MT_Tinman

According to the survey, in New Zealand media is the least trusted out of all four institutions mentioned. The level of trust for the media sits at 47 for the informed public, compared to 38 for the mass population

Given that at least half of the “informed public” are most likely members of the slime the 47% figure is unsurprising but I find the 38% figure rather alarming.

That 38% of the “general public” trust the slime is not just alarming but rather sad and a real indictment on NZ’s education levels.

Manolo

Boris Piscina

The average journalist in New Zealand is a stupid, wet-behind-the-ears, journalism school graduate with zero life experience, and, it has to be said, only a very basic grasp of written grammar.

For very much the most part they have a very definite and blatantly open political bias and agenda, which again for very much the most part is very much left wing. The Greens are favoured primarily, followed by Labour.

The concept of the media being unbiased observers has completely passed these people by. They believe they have a sacred duty to direct and define social attitudes, and to root out and destroy anyone and anything with a remotely right-wing bias.

Their editors and mostly foreign owners have a quite open commercial agenda which is ever more increasingly sensationalist and tabloid in its execution.

The combination of these things has given us a media comprised largely of idiots, activists, liars, and cynics, with considerable overlap between the four.

On top of all that, they’re not clever enough to realise that their blatant lies are obvious and transparent to the ordinary person, for whom they have at best an ill-hidden disdain and contempt founded in their own baseless hubris.

How could you have trust in a media that is corrupt and only wants to put themselves ahead of facts and editorials that the public wish to hear.They have journalists like David Fisher and Matt Nippet that continue to write columns that are baseless and devoid of facts with hatred at who or what they are writing about and then you have TV reporters that have no ethics or brainsand think more about their looks than doing justice to the story they are reporting

G152

After the nonsense in the last election and the fetid nazi
using money to subvert the media I would have thought
the level of trust was more like 5 – 10 %..
HDA breaking all sorts of laws to get a rifle and the connivance
of others to assist her pretending there was a ‘gap in the law’
The only media that can be trusted is the Blogsphere and the contributors
judged upon their apparent biases by the readers !

News services of all kinds have really only been part of the advertising deal. They financially cannot survive without the advertising.
Naturally they have to employ low value people to help with the costing.

It gets worse as we refuse to pay for the news.
Now I wouldn’t mind paying if I didn’t need to read the adds and the content was much better but???
Now even Kiwiblog has to have the advertiser. Its costs to do even basic stuff.

And with governments that introduce more and more laws, especially around freedom of speech that will get worse and cost more.
You vote the bastards in.

greenjacket

The decline in trust in the media is interesting if you are a company that advertises and wants our product to be trusted. It is not just a matter of ‘hits’ or viewers or subscribers that matter to a potential advertiser – we want to know that our advertisements will be at least reasonably credible, and if viewers don’t trust the platform, then we are wasting money.
Did that survey break down the levels of trust by media institution or even particular TV/paper?

the good news is that as other sources of info become available the MSM gets less relevant and the media bosses loss of revenues mean that they cant afford to hire quality jornos as Boris explains and so the decline continues. Bimbos and Bimbettes most of them.

All good though because oldies like me who had to endue decades if lying journos in the pockets of pollies and big business now get some alternatives.

Those of you who had the internet webby thing all your lives should be very grateful you didn’t have to live thru the propaganda stuffed down your throat. Looking back it was appalling the arrogance and contempt we were subjected to be these bastards.

As I just noted on GD it’s fucking frustrating how the MSM take all the sob stories from around the world or irrelevant shit instead of looking for newsworthy stories locally. Every fucking day there is a drowning; a tragic health story and someone farts in the Balkans and no-one sneezes.
It’s That’s Life Herald Edition.

oldpark

Think the bias and negativity against the National Government by the funny peculiar NZ Herald,was bad enough. Wellington Dom-Post is a complete abomination of the truth, all told by card carrying ratbags from Liebour/Green Parties and Journalist unions.

Rachael Membery

kowtow (12,532 comments) says:

April 2nd, 2016 at 7:14 am

Why do you think they weren’t all over the warrantless search? I would have expected them to be bleating about ‘rights’. I am personally glad that they showed restraint. I wish that they would show more in those sort of matters.

waikatogirl

The self-promotion and glorification by TV journalists who apparently see themselves as having star status is nauseating. They have reached the heady level of oracles of all wisdom, including having no conscience in twisting news to suit their own point of view.

Careful what you hear as reported news. If anyone is half aware of what goes on in the world, it is apparent we are often being fed bullshit.

Stars And Stripes

Personally I am quite surprised NGO’s trust rating is as high as it is because a lot of these are merely fronts for various political and ideological campaigns being waged and don’t seem particularly honest in their dealings with the public.

Reid

Careful what you hear as reported news. If anyone is half aware of what goes on in the world, it is apparent we are often being fed bullshit.

Yes. Such as: ‘there are WMDs in Iraq,’ ‘ISIS just appeared by magic out of the desert sands with no-one helping it,’ ‘these institutions really are too big to fail and bankers cannot be imprisoned because the GFC was no-one’s fault in particular,’ ‘Putin is a terrible leader and the Russian people hate him,’ ‘Putin invaded Ukraine,’ etc etc etc.

doggone7

Boris Piscina @ 8:06 am “The average journalist in New Zealand is a stupid, wet-behind-the-ears, journalism school graduate with zero life experience, and, it has to be said, only a very basic grasp of written grammar.
For very much the most part they have a very definite and blatantly open political bias and agenda, which again for very much the most part is very much left wing. The Greens are favoured primarily, followed by Labour.
The concept of the media being unbiased observers has completely passed these people by. They believe they have a sacred duty to direct and define social attitudes, and to root out and destroy anyone and anything with a remotely right-wing bias.”

Which got me pondering. The media person who arguably reaches the most people through various formats, radio, TV and print media, is Mike Hosking. How does your glib generalisation about the “average” journalist go when pertaining to Hosking? How many average journalists does it take to reach the number he reaches?

Scott

I’d like to see less government and I think the country would be a better place if government didn’t try to solve every problem. Conservative thinking is towards less government and more community and family and individual responsibility.

And regarding faith, I do have lots of faith but not in the media or government, I put my faith in God 🙂

tom hunter

But by his own admission he is not positioning himself as a journalist, but as an offerer of Opinion. Its a different role.

The issue is the bleed of opinion in to hard core news reporting. That’s where the distrust comes from.

The light superficial reporting of rubbish with out verifying facts – like the endless, but thankfully fewer in number lately, poor family who can’t get a house stories. The majority of those stories are quickly exposed as people who smash up houses and don’t paid their rent people but quelle surprise the journos covering the stories never find those facts its always a commentator….

On Hosking, personally, I find him to be fluffy and a typical inner city type. All flash and little substance.

If you want real “of the right wing” then the proper example is probably more Larry Williams.

Tauhei Notts

A few days in Aussie last month.
I was surprised to see the decline in both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Courier Mail. I never got to Melbourne.
But I was pleasantly surprised to read The Australian. Their sports and racing correspondents were brilliant. None of that pseudo public relations crap from professional sporting franchises.
And the opinion pieces they covered were refreshing in their brilliance. None of that all pervading left wing garbage that we see so often in our newspapers.

doggone7

And maybe the issue might be that there is some expectation that there should be “hard core news reporting.”

Why should there be? (Rhetorical) If there were money in hard core news reporting without the bleed of opinion news, agencies would do it. The market at work I think it’s called. People say they want hard core news but are there outlets like that? Why not?

People have expectations and make demands about what ‘the media’ should do and be but they want their cake and eat it too. It’s okay for their favoured channels to be opinionated yet expect someone else to be hard core and factual. They want the media to be a watchdog for the community until opinions are expressed which they disagree with.

I believe the generations of those born in the 30s-60s have different expectations of the media than from the 70s-90s and the lot after that.

The era of ‘the news is the news, is the news’ which is reportage of what happened, is gone. We welcomed that with the lionising of media figures, we got rid of the baby with the bath water if you will, and now we lament. How we or Hosking define what he is and does is sort of irrelevant, that is ‘the media.’ As is this page.

@Doggone – I have an expectation of news reportage not Wendy, Corin, Simon, etc etc letting me know its good or bad with selective presentation and sad or happy faces…. but I am a dinosaur.

The Internet is a boon and a curse. Things stay secret less frequently, you can seek angles on events more readily. Given I no longer watch broadcast TV instead picking and choosing from on demand content means the Media in a news sense is pretty much irrelevant to me. But that irrelevance has been driven by their own descent in to the trivial, the tabloid and on the few actual items of news in a bulletin their transparent agenda setting….

There is a strong place for news that is fact based, there is a strong place for investigation including investigation with an opinion and a strong place for pure opinion/commentary on happenings.

The problem is no one in NZ does any of it very well, with opinion and ideology underpinning many pieces purporting to be reportage. Hence the lack of trust when that ideology is exposed.

tom hunter

Whitmire tells a familiar story of how public and private institutions derailed an American’s dream: In 2000, he bought the $40,000 house with no money down and a $620 monthly mortgage. He made every payment. Then, in the fall of 2010, his partially disabled wife lost her state job. “Governor [Mitch] Daniels slashed the budget, and they looked for any excuse to squeeze people out,” Whitmire says. “We got lost in that shuffle — cut adrift.” The Whitmires couldn’t make their payments anymore.

They applied for a trial loan-modification through an Obama administration program, and when it was granted, their monthly bill fell to $473.87. But, like nearly a million others, the modification was canceled. After charging the lower rate for three months, their mortgage lender reinstated the higher fee and billed the family $1,878.88 in back payments. Whitmire didn’t have that kind of cash and couldn’t get it, so he and his wife filed for bankruptcy. His attorney advised him to live in the house until the bank foreclosed, but “I don’t believe in a free lunch,” Whitmire says. He moved out, leaving the keys on the kitchen table. “I thought the bank should have them.”

A year later, City Hall sent him salt for his wounds: a $300 citation for tall grass at 1900 W. 10th St. Telling the story, he swipes dried grass from his jeans and shakes his head. “The city dinged me for tall weeds at my bank’s house.” After another pull from the water bottle, Whitmire kicks a steel-toed boot into the ground he once owned. “You can’t trust anybody or anything anymore.”

Whitmire is an angry man. He is among a group of voters most skeptical of President Obama: non-college-educated white males. He feels betrayed – not just by Obama, who won his vote in 2008, but by the institutions that were supposed to protect him: his state, which laid off his wife; his government in Washington, which couldn’t rescue homeowners who had played by the rules; his bank, which failed to walk him through the correct paperwork or warn him about a potential mortgage hike; his city, which penalized him for somebody else’s error; and even his employer, a construction company he likes even though he got laid off.

“I was middle class for 10 years, but it’s done,” Whitmire says. “I’ve lost my home. I live in a trailer now because of a mortgage company and an incompetent government.”

So one year on and it’s gotten worse. Journos are now “the least trusted profession by a country mile” according to this latest research.

How can we tell that this is a problem with our 4th estate?

Well – this very important research with a massive public interest component won’t be reported by the NZ news media!

So what should happen?

The obvious thing is we should de-fund any public broadcasters – if this isn’t a damning condemnation of the appalling job they’re doing then nothing is. And Bill English is always on about stopping low quality public expenditure – surely here is a perfect example of shite quality in it’s purest form.

Until the media in NZ owns this problem and this we see an attitudinal shift in the public trust – not one taxpayers $ should be subsidising this level of media mediocrity.

tom hunter

Strange, my link to The Atlantic story has gathered more attention on the latest “Trump” thread than here. Okay, but even so, here’s another quote that belongs here:

Maranda Whitehead remembers fondly her son Jordan’s first days at the neighborhood public school. He was “excited, happy, thrilled to go to kindergarten,” she says. It was downhill from there. Teachers could barely keep track of the students in their crowded classrooms; they had no money to keep up with modern trends in technology or education; they didn’t form relationships with parents, not even Whitehead and others who wanted to get involved; and after the early grades, they taught a rote style focused on the state’s compulsory tests.

“Every year,” Whitehead says of Jordan, “the light got dimmer and dimmer, and finally he hated school.” His joy of learning didn’t return until she enrolled him in the sixth grade at Hoosier Academy, one of many charter schools that have sprung up across Indiana to provide an alternative.

It’s a national trend: Parents are fed up with traditional public schools because they are failing to adapt — or failing outright. The number of charter-school students nationwide has nearly quadrupled over the past decade to more than 1.6 million in the 2009-10 school year. In 2007, the most recent data available, the number of homeschooled students was about 1.5 million, a 76 percent increase since 1999. Many new charter schools cost the state less money than traditional schools and craft school-specific curricula, free from rigid state and district requirements. And although they spring from Indiana’s attempt to create competition for (and, thus, higher quality in) public schools, they also represent a demand-side phenomenon: Parents would not seek alternatives to a healthy public-school system.

tom hunter

More news from Declining Trust in Institutions, from a different article this time. The author is Jack Dunphy, a pseudonym for an ex LA cop who relgularly writes about policing in the USA for PJ Media:

So we are alert to the presence of gang members traveling through rival territory, or of those in their own territory whose behavior might indicate they are preparing to advance the feud. It’s just a few blocks from Main Street to Avalon Boulevard, but when one traverses that distance one has crossed from one gang’s territory into another’s. As we drive slowly along 83rd Street, we see gathered near the entrance to an alleyway just east of Avalon a few members of the local street gang, one of whom is perhaps responsible for killing Jermaine Murray.

In an ideal world, you and I might approach these young men. We might radio for another unit or two to assist us, as the mere sight of our slowing and the opening of our doors might very well set them off running in all directions. What’s more, one or more of them might be armed, or there may be guns secreted nearby for ready access should some rival venture across Avalon looking to settle up for Jermaine’s killing. These and many other things cross our minds as we weigh the possibilities for our course of action.

Traditional policing – in an ideal world, Unfortunately this 2016 Los Angeles – and not even as glamorous as the LA of three years hence in BladeRunner

What do we do? We drive on, for we are not police officers in an ideal world. We are police officers in Los Angeles in the year 2016, and we know there is little to be gained and much to be lost if we get out of our car and engage these young men. If none of them runs and none is armed, if everything goes as pleasantly as things can go these days, we will at the very least be given a load of grief, first by the young men themselves, then by the many family members and other sympathizers who, attracted by the commotion, will soon emerge from nearby homes and apartment houses.

And if one of them runs? Well then we might have to chase him, and if we catch him we might have to hit him, an incident that will be captured on cell phone video and posted on YouTube and, if the footage is sufficiently inflammatory, broadcast on local television news. And if one of these young men is armed and we have to shoot him, and if video of the shooting does not clearly demonstrate that we were fired upon first, we will see our chain of command abandon us and pronounce our tactics unsound, this despite the fact that few of our superiors have actually stood in our shoes. And we might see that video become a national news story, one that will prompt the police commissioners, the mayor, the governor, and even the president of the United States himself to offer their unschooled opinions on the deficiencies of our actions.

People who look like the sons Obama never had.

So, as we are not fools, we drive on. And if one of those young men should later fall at the hand of a gang rival, or if one of them should venture over to Main Street and shoot some other member of Jermaine’s gang, well then, we’ll go code-3 to the crime scene and ring the area with yellow tape and stand around while the homicide detectives sort things out. And we’ll go home and tell our family and friends how sad it all is, but what can we do?

And now that we’ve chosen to ignore this gathering of street criminals, and after other officers have done the same with similar groups across the area, those criminals will be all the more emboldened to carry on with the behavior that terrorizes their law-abiding neighbors, for the only thing that will deter that behavior is the credible threat of the bad consequences that flow from being stopped by the police while possessing a gun. If the cops won’t act, if they drive on by, the drive-by shootings will only increase.

Hands Up. Don’t Shoot – unless you love driveby’s, which are cool.

And that is exactly what is happening in Los Angeles. The twelve murders reported in 77th Street Division so far this year is double the amount for the same period last year. And so far this year, arrests for violent crime in the area are down by 19 percent. In Southwest Division, just to the north of 77th Street, there have been ten murders this year compared with none at this same time last year. Yes, some areas of the city have seen their homicide numbers decline incrementally, but in the city as a whole there has been a 16-percent increase in murders over last year.

Change the particulars and the same principles apply to almost any city you can name. Murder rates are soaring in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Baltimore and elsewhere as the police in those cities, acutely aware of the politics of the moment, attune their behavior so as to minimize risk

He means not the traditional risk to life and limb, which every officer understands. He means the risk of having one’s life neutron-bombed so that your life is destroyed but you remain alive.